Autechre 777 realization, I understand Autechre's trick now

Hey so I was in the car today listening to 777, and I'm not usually a huge fan of that album, but I figured why not. I noticed when that track came on that the bass is set obnoxiously high in comparison to the treble so I turned the bass down a bunch of clicks and boosted the treble all the way up.

I'm in the middle of driving and all of a sudden I hear a KICK ASS autechre melody that I have never heard before. Well not exactly, I had heard it before but it was covered up mostly by the extreme bass.

I listened to the entire rest of the track with the treble all the way up and bass all the way down, and I must say this is my new fav little melody by a long shot. I'm talking about the part that starts playing at around 3:00, but eventually becomes a predominant solo synth at about 4:00. If you do not know the melody I speak of, I encourage you to go listen to the 4 minute mark with specified eq settings.

I was scratching my head thinking 'Why the fuck would autechre make such a fantastic melody and then completely block it out with the lows'. Then it hit me, thats what gets people hooked on the autechre music, they like to hide the best parts of tracks in the mix sometimes, so that it always takes repeated listens and close inspection to pick out the gems, I think it is their artistic way of distorting/hiding their key bits is the huge reason they seem so much more engaging than other electronic artists.

So I figured I'd retrospect a tad here and point out some of the previous times they have 'Hidden' the key components of tracks:

Montreal: High pitched synth is never at a constant volume and as a result specific chunks of the melody get blocked out from time to time, so that the full melody never plays all the way through, but since you can compare the fragments the melody is easy to follow. This is not the strongest case, but it is a technique they will employ many times in future work

Chiastic slide: 4:25 the tune that plays has a very strong envelope on it and as a result alot of the notes are semi-muted so that the melody is never developed fully or powerfully, but it works so well.

Rettic ac: need I say more? Pretty much every track on Chiastic slide employs the hiding technique strongly

Pen Expers

Uviol is interesting because it hides the soft chimes in the background with a track that sounds unsettling/ugly in contrast. I bet if you could solo that track it would be beautiful

Surripere: 9:00 min mark. The synth never fully reveals itself in one measure, and the synth is buried in the mix to only pop its head up from time to time.

Theme of sudden roundabout

Goz quarter bass, wobbles in and out of presence.

Latent quarter: So much release on the pads at the end that the melody blurs together, and the volumes are always changing as well, so as to never really present the melody in its 'true' form.

Last 3 min of Draun quarter: Holy shit just found this one, pads buried in mix again.

Pretty much ALL of LP5 so I'm not going to bother

Plyphon and perlence are both fuckeries on a more normal melody you can almost hear in your head during the song

Second half of Fol4 has a sick beat and pad going on but its more or less covered up

Synth towards end of Clipper, they could have made it much more powerful and it would have sounded good but the repression is awesome.

C/Pach: Perfect example of hiding chunks of the melody, only revealing parts, sometimes ommitting it completely, never presented in its entirety.

Last minute of LCC, the AWESOME synth that is very quiet and quick on the decay, hidden/distorted to almost complete illegibility

wow... awesome I have some serious re-listens to get to know

i like these threads

Somebody buy this kid a journal or something.

How could you forget Sublimit? That's like the whole point of the track. It's all about whats buried in that one.

  thehauntingsoul said:

wow... awesome I have some serious re-listens to get to know

I suggest investing in better sound gear.

THS constantly brings the nerd-ruckus.

Hello

loudness clarifies

  mafted said:

loudness clarifies

indeed, if you haven't heard Ae loud and really paid attention, you haven't heard Ae at all.

Maybe they just have good reference monitors and you have bad ones?

haha yeah I write fuckloads of banter, its because I work in a call center answering phones for futureshop/best buy. There is ALOT of down time so I ramble. Deal with it.

  theSun said:

  mafted said:

loudness clarifies

 

indeed, if you haven't heard Ae loud and really paid attention, you haven't heard Ae at all.

  thehauntingsoul said:

haha yeah I write fuckloads of banter, its because I work in a call center answering phones for futureshop/best buy. There is ALOT of down time so I ramble. Deal with it.

Do you ever find that you answer the phone, and you just say:

CHK CHK tssssssss pk pk pk brrrrrrrk CHK CHK fzzzzzzz

instead of words?

Agreed. There's some FUCKING AWESOME jazz in the middle of Acroyear2, but obscured by all the other stuff.

you call this a "trick"? its like the fucking definition of IDM

yeah upon re-assessment it appears all i have done here is define something that i have known abstractly in my mind for years

  thehauntingsoul said:

yeah upon re-assessment it appears all i have done here is define something that i have known abstractly in my mind for years

and something the rest of us have known consciously for years

  futureimage said:

Agreed. There's some FUCKING AWESOME jazz in the middle of Acroyear2, but obscured by all the other stuff.

Yeah, I fucking flipped out when I first caught that little jazz melody, awesome track. There's about 4 different melodies going at once near the end of the song.

Obfuscated melodies ftw

I remember them saying that mixing is a part of the musical process, they mix tracks as they produce them. I will get the SPL's EQ Rangers in the coming weeks, gonna be fun to analyse all that.

  Goum Le Chat said:

I will get the SPL's EQ Rangers in the coming weeks, gonna be fun to analyse all that.

explain yourself, what is this SPL EQ ranger?

Sound Performance Lab. They make stuff like preamps, amps, eqs, channel strips... hi-quality stuff.

EQ Rangers are three plug-ins : vocal, bass and full range. It should be fine to tweak Ae's work. You can totally cut or boost frequencies from 40 to 16k hertz.

  Goum Le Chat said:

It should be fine to tweak Ae's work.

sacrilege!

  modey said:

  Goum Le Chat said:

It should be fine to tweak Ae's work.

sacrilege!

somebody kill this goum guy

Yeah kill me, as a cat I has 9 lives.